CNet On Communicator 5.0 Delay

Wednesday October 6th, 1999

A number of people sent in links to this news of Communicator 5.0's "delay" at CNet.

According to CNet's Paul Festa, who seems unable or unwilling to write a positive Netscape piece, "Netscape is far behind its main browser competitor, Microsoft, in two areas where it once led: technology and market share. Although it commanded about 80 percent of the desktop browser market just a few years ago, Netscape is now down to a minority position." Paul goes on to cite anonymous sources who provided him with information on XUL and a new email/IM hybrid scheme.

Most news sites I've seen that *do* allow people the chance to respond, tend to get responses only from the "vocal minority". Usually, it works out as eighteen million people giving the same ill-thought-out and poorly-spelled reasoning why Microsoft sucks. It is not worth anybody's time to trawl through these in the hope of finding something interesting or sensible.

(Not to say that there isn't well-thought out and correctly-spelled reasoning for the same anti-Microsoft premise; but what you get on those sites ain't it.)

BBC News <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/> has a quite nice "talking point" facility, in which they post only selected views (they also have yes/no votes). Of course, that editing is subject to accusations of censorship, but it does increase the chance of having a few opinions up that are worth reading / laughing at. Unfortunately they don't do this for every news article, only a few selected items each day...